Law as an Instrument of Mental Health in the United States and Soviet Russia

Abstract

Much has been written in recent decades about place of psychiatry in the and especially about the need to incorporate into the law insights derived from psychiatric research. Far too little attention has been given, however, to the closely related question of the place of law in psychiatry and the need to incorporate into psychiatry insights derived from legal research. Law is not merely a fact of social life; it is also a body of ideas. Implicit in legal concepts, and often explicit in them as well, are theories of human personality. Moreover, both through de facto operation and through its concepts and theories, law-like psychiatry-seeks to influence human personality. In helping to maintain social order, law at the same time and by the same token helps to maintain the mental health of the members of society. Those who think of the road from psychiatry to law as simply a one-way street are misled, I believe, by the sharp distinction which is often drawn between the lawyer's concern with social order and the psychiatrist's concern with personality. In one of the best expositions of what law may learn from psychiatry, we are told that focus of the law is on society primarily, and only secondarily on the individual; in psychiatry the emphasis is almost exclusively on the individual. 1 But the truth is that society and the are really two dimensions of the same thing-man. The law, at least, cannot separate the two, and psychiatry separates them at its peril. The word individual is, in fact, quite misleading, for it suggests an isolated being sufficient unto himself and devoid of relationships with others. Psychiatrists are concerned, of course, not with individuals in this abstract sense but with real people, people who have mothers and fathers, husbands or wives, children, friends, teachers,